(no subject)

[lea_hazel]

I was reading a historical romance that came strongly recommended and, after numerous attempts to power through the bits that bothered me, I had to give up and leave it at about the 1/3 mark. The hero basically coerces the heroine into marrying him under threat of incarceration. What really got to me was (and I encountered this at least once before in a novella from a highly acclaimed historical romance author), she was in really dire straits and her situation was desperate and upsetting, and he was treating it all as some great big game. And was thinking constantly about how he decided that she would be the light in his dark life, or some such nonsense, without giving much thought to what she was supposed to get out of the arrangement.

It sucks, because the heroine (and even the hero) started out really interesting, and I thought it was going to go in an interesting direction. And I really wanted to like this one.